Monday, December 29, 2014

More than 100 years after the birth of cinema, it
sometimes feels like every story has been told. But the best films of 2014
dared to break out of their genres, explore new ways of filmmaking, and inspire
viewers. Some of them even provided tools for popular understanding of our
current political moment. This year, Selma,
Tales of the Grim Sleeper, and Out In The Night all told stories of a
criminal justice system harming Black communities, while Dear White People used satire to address racist power structures.
Documentaries like The Great Invisible
and Citizenfour attacked government
and corporate malfeasance, science fiction films like Snowpiercer helped imagine future revolutions, and Pride delivered a lesson in movement
solidarity.

Below are my top 14 films of the year. As always, many of them didn’t receive
the distribution they deserved, but will no doubt live on as more audiences
discover them online.

14
– Dear White People – After months of hype and viral videos, Dear White People had a lot of anticipation
to live up to. While the film focused narrowly on life at an elite, mostly
white, college, it managed to pull in a wider range of issues and themes. This
fresh and original film served notice that writer/director Justin Simien, and
his talented young cast, are rising talents to watch.

13 - Whiplash - Damien Chazelle’s Sundance award winner was
a tense, brutal drama about a young man and his mentor/teacher.
Or, as Barbara
Herman called it, the “best homoerotic S&M film about jazz drumming
you'll see this year.”

12 – Coherence – This film slipped under most critic’s
radar, but filmmaker James Ward Byrkit’s debut about alternate realities is a
smart and challenging low-budget sci-fi mind-bender. It’s the kind of film you
want to watch again right after it ends, to keep unlocking its puzzles.

11
– The Babadook – Writer/director Jennifer Kent’s debut is the
scariest movie I’ve seen in years. In a genre often dominated by male filmmakers
and sexist tropes, Kent’s film is a breath of fresh air, and a truly terrifying
balance of psychological and supernatural horror that keeps you in the dark,
jumping at shadows.

10
– Edge of Tomorrow – It’s not often that a Hollywood blockbuster
starring Tom Cruise makes my list, but Doug Liman, director of Bourne Identity and Go, among other films, is a filmmaker who knows how to make an old
genre come alive. Edge of Tomorrow is
a rare find; a smart and exciting Hollywood sci-fi thriller.

9 – The Great Invisible – So much has
been written and filmed about the BP Drilling Disaster of 2010, that it’s shocking
to find stories that haven’t been told. But filmmaker Margaret Brown (who also went
behind the scenes of Mobile, Alabama’s racially segregated Mardi Gras in 2009’s The Order of Myths) has given this disaster the documentary it
deserves, with stunning access to both families on the Gulf Coast, and to men
with money and power who work within the oil industry.

7 – Tales of the Grim Sleeper – Before seeing this documentary, I’d never heard of the Grim Sleeper, an alleged serial killer arrested in South Central Los Angeles in 2010. This film presents a case that the race, gender and class of the victims meant the news media and police were not interested in stopping the killer. Over a period of more than two decades, scores of women, almost all of them Black street-based sex workers and/or drug users, were raped and killed while the police and media turned a blind eye. Veteran documentarian Nick Broomfield talks to a coalition of Black women activists in South Central LA who worked to pressure the police and media to pay attention. He also talks to women on the street who encountered (and narrowly escaped) the killer. One woman gave police a sketch of the man, and led officers to his block more than a decade before he was caught, but the LAPD apparently did nothing with the information. Other women Broomfield finds were afraid to even talk to the police. This film is a disturbing and difficult companion to the Black Lives Matter movement.

6 – Out in the
Night – The Jersey Four, a group of young African
American lesbians who were vilified in the media and aggressively prosecuted
after they fought back
against a hate crime, is an incredibly important story. And filmmaker blair
dorosh-walther has created a powerful and urgent film that captures the lives
and families of these young women, and shows a criminal justice system more
interested in attacking them than protecting them. This film needs to be widely
seen.

5 – Citizenfour – Filmmaker Laura Poitras was already making a
film about (and had been a victim
of) US government surveillance when Edward Snowden came to her. Long before
this film came out, she had already made history by helping bring Snowden’s
revelations to a worldwide audience. All this film needed to do to secure its
place in history was to be a record of those revelations. But Poitras chose
instead to make a film that takes the viewer inside a historical moment, making
this not just important for what it tells, but also an example of bold and
creative filmmaking.

4 – Selma – Ava DuVernay’s last film, Middle of Nowhere, made my 2012 best-of list with a moving story of families affected by the prison industrial complex. That it’s nearly unprecedented for a Black woman filmmaker to make a big budget Hollywood film shows how far we haven’t come, and this film gives a glimpse of what we’ve been missing. While Selma may not give enough weight to the grassroots activists of SNCC, and (despite the cries of some historians) may be too respectful to President Johnson, ultimately this is a powerful document of an important historical moment.

3 – Pride - If you like uplifting films about
inter-movement solidarity and class struggle, this British crowd-pleaser from
Matthew Warchus is perfect for you. A moving, funny, charming, film based on a
true story of gay activists in the 80s that built an alliance with striking miners
in Thatcher’s Britain.

2 – Boyhood – Enough has been written about
Richard Linklater’s bold and wise film that there’s no reason to add my praise.
But even without the concept of watching actors age over a period of twelve
years, this film feels like the culmination of what Linklater has been building
towards throughout a career that started with the formal experimentation of Slacker and continued to push against
narrative boundaries from Waking Life
to A Scanner Darkly, Before Sunrise, and Fast Food Nation.

1 – Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) – Filmmaker Alejandro
González Iñárritu announced himself as a talent to watch with his
debut Amores Perros, but nothing in
his career to date comes close to the triumph of this film. Behind the film’s play
within a play storyline lies a filmmaking tour de force that succeeds on
every technical level and leaves the viewer breathless, with no wasted moment
or misstep.

Among other notable films this year: Concerning Violence feels more like a doctoral thesis than a movie, but if you are interested in the history of anti-colonial struggle in Africa, and want to see old footage of Amilcar Cabral and Thomas Sankara, and hear narration based on text by Frantz Fanon read by Lauryn Hill, then this film may be perfect for you. Jodorowski’s Dune, directed by Frank Pavich, documents a brilliant film that almost existed, but even without being
made proved itself more influential than most films ever can hope for. Gareth
Evan’s The Raid 2 (part one made my
2012 list) continued to beat all of Hollywood action films at their own game.
Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler was as
creepy as its name, and can be read as a blistering attack on both local TV
news and capitalism. David Fincher’s Gone
Girl was either built upon misogynist stereotypes, or a comment on
stultifying roles of patriarchy. Ana
Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone
at Night, the Iranian feminist vampire film, is moody, clever and
surprising.

Six Black youth facing decades in prison over a school fight involving a white youth who had no serious injuries symbolized an unjust system in some of the same ways that today Ferguson Missouri has come to represent police abuses. The fight occurred not long after white students had left nooses under a tree in what was seen as a warning to Black students. Mychal Bell was the first (and, ultimately, only) of the six youth to face trial, he was convicted and spent nearly ten months in prison before his sentence was overturned.

Marcus Jones was a dedicated, passionate, and outspoken advocate and activist for his son and the other young men, appearing frequently on radio and TV and speaking frankly about racial dimensions of the case, calling the charges a "modern day lynching."

A Jena man helping a friend move some wooden pallets died Saturday afternoon on La. Highway 8, according to Louisiana State Police. Marcus W. Jones, 43, died in the incident, although troopers aren't sure exactly how yet. Around 5:41 p.m., troopers responded to a crash on La. 8 after a 2007 Chevrolet pickup truck, driven by 22-year-old Brittany N. Walker of Jena, struck Jones, who was lying in the eastbound lane. Walker tried to avoid hitting Jones, who was wearing a black jacket and black pants, reads the release. A friend of Jones' arrived at the scene, telling troopers that Jones had been helping him move wooden pallets. Jones had been standing in the bed of the friend's pickup truck, holding down the pallets, according to the release. The friend said that, when he arrived at his destination, Jones no longer was in the truck. The friend had been retracing his path, searching for Jones, when he came upon the scene.